Featured Research

from universities, journals, and other organizations

Turning down the heat but keeping warm

Date:

March 29, 2012

Source:

Inderscience

Summary:

Despite the rising global average temperatures that climate change is bringing, there is still a need to keep warm in our homes especially when it's cold outside. However, even highly efficient domestic heating systems use large amounts of energy and unless generated through carbon-neutral means will add to the ongoing outpouring of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Improved insulation can only provide so much resilience against the cold; in the end we still need fresh air.

Share This

Despite the rising global average temperatures that climate change is bringing, there is still a need to keep warm in our homes especially when it's cold outside. However, even highly efficient domestic heating systems use large amounts of energy and unless generated through carbon-neutral means will add to the ongoing outpouring of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Improved insulation can only provide so much resilience against the cold; in the end we still need fresh air.

Related Articles

Writing in the Journal of Design Research, a team at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, suggests that now is the hour to exploit good design to explore new avenues by taking into account cultural and social differences with regard to what is considered warm.

By taking a different view on comfort, the team hopes to step away from the conventional paradigm of technologically improving energy efficiency or moderating consumer behaviour through the standard "turn down the thermostat" type pleas commonly seen in public service efforts and government initiatives.

Lenneke Kuijer and Annelise de Jong suggest that if you can stand the heat, then a holistic social practice approach is what is needed rather than isolated technology or behaviour changes . Drawing on earlier work in sociology and building science, they argue that the concept of comfort can roughly be approached in two ways: as a universal physiological construct or as a negotiable socio-cultural one.

The latter perspective allows "comfort" to become something that can be achieved by people individually rather than offered by buildings. The latter is assumed in the decades old, but still widely used, predicted mean vote (PMV) model of comfort that uses mean temperatures, air movement and humidity, to help determine building design for decades.In that model, people are considered as more or less passive receptors of this comfort, the team explains. More worryingly, the PMV model proclaims that people are comfortable at a temperature of 20 to 23 Celsius, whereas in studies around the world people have reported to be comfortable at temperatures ranging from 6 to 40 Celsius. "People feel comfortable within a much wider range of climate conditions than the models predict," the team says.

However, despite the wide range of temperatures that people might perceive as comfortable, central heating, air conditioning and humidity control have narrowed the expectations for huge numbers of people. The acceptable range of conditions has been squashed to the detriment of energy efficiency as those systems work against the natural conditions to maintain the "comfort" levels within those narrow boundaries.

And, therein lies the potential for energy saving; to loosen the strings on indoor climate control and at the same time offer people a wider range of opportunities to make themselves comfortable, according to their own personal wishes.

In search of such opportunities, the researchers have compared domestic heating arrangements in family homes in Japan and The Netherlands and traced how domestic heating practices have evolved over the last fifty years leading to the central heating systems now common in many homes.

The details of their findings offer several new avenues of thought for designers. The research could expand the ways in which we achieve comfort in the area of 'person heating' to complement the increasingly dominant paradigms of space heating. Having more quick and local ways of getting warm at our disposal, the researchers argue could allow us to turn down the heat and still keep ourselves comfortable. As a side effect, such arrangements can expand the boundaries of acceptable comfort levels with the end point of reducing our reliance on narrowly controlled climate conditions.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Inderscience. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

More From ScienceDaily

More Earth & Climate News

Featured Research

Mar. 3, 2015 — Attendance at schools exposed to high levels of traffic-related air pollution is linked to slower cognitive development among 7- to 10-year-old children in Barcelona, according to a new ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — While studying a ground-nesting bird population near El Reno, Okla., a research team found that stress during a severe weather outbreak of May 31, 2013, had manifested itself into malformations in ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Researchers studied quartz from the San Andreas Fault at the microscopic scale, the scale at which earthquake-triggering stresses originate. The results could one day lead to a better understanding ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — The 3-D printing scene, a growing favorite of do-it-yourselfers, has spread to the study of plasma physics. With a series of experiments, researchers have found that 3-D printers can be an important ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Researchers have developed a new way of rapidly screening yeasts that could help produce more sustainable biofuels. The new technique could also be a boon in the search for new ways of deriving ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — For almost a century, scientists have been puzzled by a process that is crucial to much of the life in Earth's oceans: Why does calcium carbonate, the tough material of seashells and corals, ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Major cities in the UK are falling behind their international counterparts in terms of their use of smart technologies, according to a new study. The research has found that smart cities in the UK, ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — To simulate chimp behavior, scientists created a computer model based on equations normally used to describe the movement of atoms and molecules in a confined space. An interdisciplinary research ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Rather than just waiting patiently for any pollinator that comes their way to start the next generation of seeds, some plants appear to recognize the best suitors and 'turn on' to increase the chance ... full story

Featured Videos

Looted and Leaking, South Sudan's Oil Wells Pose Health Risk

AFP (Mar. 3, 2015) — Thick black puddles and a looted, leaking ruin are all that remain of the Thar Jath oil treatment facility, once a crucial part of South Sudan&apos;s mainstay industry. Duration: 01:13
Video provided by AFP

Related Stories

June 26, 2013 — Energy conservation in a small number of households could go a long way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, scientists are reporting. Their study measured differences in energy demands at the ... full story

Jan. 15, 2013 — Scientists say 2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the exception of 1998, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record ... full story

June 11, 2012 — Vast stores of carbon in U.S. forest soils could be released by rising global temperatures, according to a new study. Scientists found that heating soil in Wisconsin and North Carolina woodlands by ... full story

Mar. 24, 2011 — Recent climate modeling has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give the Earth a wetter climate in the short term. New research offers a novel explanation ... full story

July 1, 2010 — With carbon dioxide in the atmosphere approaching alarming levels, even halting emissions altogether may not be enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Could scrubbing carbon dioxide from the ... full story

ScienceDaily features breaking news and videos about the latest discoveries in health, technology, the environment, and more -- from major news services and leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.